General Secretary, Michael Thompson has released a statement on what went wrong on the first count of the marriage canon vote.

You can read the whole thing from the link above, but let’s focus on this part:

It was at that point that Mr. Copeland, the person supporting the electronic voting, discovered that it was in fact my own vote as General Secretary that had been overlooked in the electronic count. Initially, we thought that it had been miscoded as a lay vote, rather than as a clergy vote. We have since been provided, by Mr. Copeland, the list from which the electronic voting was coded, a list prepared by my office. That list described the General Secretary as “clergy, non-voting”. Data-on-the-spot simply coded the information that my office gave them. This error took place in my office, and I take responsibility for it. We were more than well-served by Data-on-the-spot. In fact, without Mr. Copeland’s prompt attention, I am not sure that we would have discovered the nature of the error and had a chance to understand and correct it.

Thompson is telling us that his vote was “overlooked” because he was categorised as a non-voting member of synod.

The computerised voting system was supplied by Data on the Spot. For an idea of how the system works, take a look at the video here. You will note that “each clicker device has a unique and secure serial number”. That means that the data gathering program would have, as part of its input, a database of serial numbers correlating to each person’s name.

Thompson is claiming that he was designated (and, therefore, his clicker was designated) in the database as a non-voting member of synod. Any computer program worth anything would immediately flag this as an error as soon as the non-voting member used his secure clicker in an attempt to vote. The marriage canon vote was at the end of the synod. How many times had Thompson already used the clicker before this in other votes? Why was the error not flagged before the marriage canon vote?

Either the Data on the Spot programmers have some serious problems with missing error routines in their computer code or….. there is something very fishy going on.

There should be a thorough third party audit of the whole process.